Thursday, July 28, 2011

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has repeatedly cautioned that Right-wing Conservative extremists would be among the groups most likely to commit an act of mass violence in the United States. Their most recent warnings have come in the form of a training tape which is part of the "See Something, Say Something" program.

Each time I sat down to write something about the Norway Massacre and the DHS report, another American right-wing bloviator would produce a stupifying mouth utterance regarding the tragedy in Norway that would give me a moment of head-shaking pause. When they keep piling on, it is hard to produce something timely, as the target keeps on moving.

I routinely listen to Right-wing talk radio in order to gather intelligence on the opposition. And as expected, their commentary on the Norway Massacre has followed a predictable script in which the responses by Beck, Levin, Savage, Cunningham, et al. are, as always, no less detached from reality. In their land of make believe, Anders Behring was a liberal, he was not a Christian, and any effort to link him to the faith is an intentional smear of the Judeo-Christian community. And funny if it were not so tragic, the Right-wing deploys the same arguments used by liberal critics of profiling in the case of racial minorities, to defend themselves against such an "injustice."

And of course, Rush Limbaugh is doing a dance where he connects all evil in the world, here being the soul searching that Norwegians are doing in the aftermath of the Anders Behrings' murder spree, to President Obama because he is "an enabler" of terrorism and an "America hater."

The reaction to the Department of Homeland Security's warnings about Right-wing violence and the "See Something, Say Something" program is powerful not because of the obvious: Given the seditious political atmosphere ginned up by the Tea Party GOP in the Age of Obama would such worries about domestic terrorism really be that unexpected or surprising?

Rather, the response by the New Right to the Department of Homeland Security's initiatives is a damning reveal of the myopia of Whiteness and Conservatism...to the degree that in the American political and social context, the two can be separated from one another.

If the very same warnings had been issued about Muslim Americans, a member of a different racial minority group, or even "liberals," the Right would have jumped to defend the report as necessary and to be heeded in a time of terror. There would hearings on the matter.

Following the logic of the Right-wing playbook, only traitors would boo hoo about racial profiling and the trampling of their Constitutional rights. If you have nothing to hide why be so fearful?

The Right's reaction to the DHS and the Norway Massacre speak to an additional pathology of Whiteness. The shock and awe by racism deniers and white victimologists, that a white person, a white middle class man especially, would ever be a priori suspect of a crime is a mirror for the gross narcissism of the White Soul. Whiteness never imagines itself as anything other than benign, kind, non-threatening, wholesome, and good. Criminals and terrorists are "those people." Whiteness sees itself as perennially decent, moral, and just.

By definition, Whiteness can never be the stuff of terrorism, threat, or violence.

For many, the White Man is a frightening thing; he is to be run from; he brings death and destruction; the bogeyman is not some amorphous figure, historically he was a white man brandishing a gun or whip, wearing the colors of Imperial Power, the hood of the Grand Cyclops, or donning a business suit and carrying an ID for the World Bank. The White Man's Burden was never benign...regardless of how it was framed and mythologized.

Moreover, in the American experience it is verboten and anathema to call attention to the fact that the largest terrorist group in the history of the United States was the Ku Klux Klan, a civil society organization that killed thousands of African Americans and others in its one hundred plus year reign of terror. It is equally inconvenient to call to light that white people have systematically terrorized people of color (the genocide against our indigenous brothers and sisters; the slaveocracy; Jim and Jane Crow; racial pogroms in cities such as Tulsa and East St. Louis) in the pursuit of the psychological and material wages of Whiteness, and that the Racial State's reign of terror was a central feature of American democracy, and not an aberration from it.

Whiteness finds this hard if not impossible to process. Many white folks, however benign or good or otherwise socially progressive, often have a hard time accepting that White people are perceived as dangerous by many of their fellow Americans. Liberals and others may respond to such realities with cultivated guilt and shame; Conservatives respond with rage, pleading feigned victimhood, and denial.

In these matters, I am left grappling with a set of meta level questions.

Although they are an ocean apart, are the white terrorists, the McVeighs, the Tides shooter, the Hutaree militia, the Birther Tea Party 9/12 party political thugs and seditionists, part of the same collective political subconscious, an outgrowth of the same ether and spirit of an age? Is the right-wing echo chamber in the United States, with its eliminationist "commonsense" notions that liberals are a disease to be destroyed, a cousin to the echoes and chorus which fueled the Norway Massacre?

Ultimately, are Anders Behring and the white middle class domestic terrorists that the Department of Homeland Security has warned the American people about a function of the same pathological Whiteness?

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

These economic trends bear potentially dire political consequences. Public opinion data collected by my colleagues and me over the past 20 years demonstrated that black disillusionment with the prospects for racial equality had grown from the early 1990s to the point that by 2005, four out of five blacks believed that racial equality would not be achieved in the foreseeable future. After two decades of growth, this percentage declined by 30 percentage points by October 2008 and the eve of the election of Barack Obama. For the first time since we started collecting data on this question, more than half of blacks believed that racial equality for blacks would be soon achieved or had already been achieved.

This relative level of euphoria was short-lived and plummeted with the onset of the economic crisis. Once again, half of all blacks believe that racial equality either will not be achieved in their lifetimes or not at all within the U.S.

The combination of blocked roads to social mobility, continuing economic crisis, the near unanimous belief among blacks that racism remains a major problem in the United States, and the consequent widespread and growing despair about the prospects for racial equality provide the grounds, if not the inevitability, for an ever more volatile and conflicted racial landscape.

Or stated as a question: When one group has such a disproportionate percentage of resources, in a political system driven by interest group politics, how does their out-sized influence in a post-Citizens United era game the system against the Common Good and the "rest of us" in the service of an increasingly narrow political agenda?

Economists have long studied the increasing gap between the haves and "the have nots" in America. While their analysis was technical, and thus mired in the stuff of gini coefficients and income percentages by cohort as adjusted for inflation, the mainstream media is finally making their work more accessible for a general audience.

Sociologists and political scientists have long thought that the public didn't "get" how extreme disparities in wealth and income were a social ill because our political culture does not have a language with which to discuss class. After all, Americans are not Europeans with all of their fancy third parties, and where "Socialism" and "nationalized health care" are not bad or evil words.

Even more vexing, it seems that a class based politics that speaks honestly about wealth inequality and the income gap remains hamstrung by a logic where voters, especially Conservatives, look at the rich (as opposed to their own families and communities) as proxies for their own immediate economic well-being and the general direction of the nation's economy. In total, the poor and working classes often choose policies that work against their own immediate economic self-interest, and that of the country as a whole.

Given the latter, I am not hopeful that America will see a radical departure from its uncritical, corporate-consumerist model of citizenship. However, perhaps the Great Recession will force a little bit more critical reflection by an occasionally attentive public on these broader economic issues.

In total, the racial wealth gap has existed for decades and is the result of structural policy decisions made by white elites and the federal government. As coverage of the divide gains traction in the days leading up to the debt ceiling vote (MSNBC even had a feature on this "new" story today), how will the media's frame on the story develop?

Some questions and possibilities:

1. Will the long racist history of the VA and FHA home lending programs, as well as redlining be discussed?

2. Will the chattering classes discuss how federal policy created the ghetto and thus systematically devalued the communities which black and brown folks were most likely to find themselves? Is there going to be a mention of "sundown towns" and the efforts of whites through pogroms and other acts of violence to destroy prosperous black communities in places such as Tulsa, Oklahoma?

3. Will there be a discussion of discrimination in mortgage and bank lending practices that continue to the present, and which put blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans into exotic mortgages, with higher interest rates, and thus at greater risk of default, than whites with comparable credit profiles?

4. Will there be a discussion of how when Social Security was established it explicitly excluded large segments of the labor force from benefits because African Americans were concentrated as domestics, farmers, and other laborers in the Jim and Jane Crow South, a class of laborers not included in that benefits program? And even more pointedly, that because of racialized disparities in health care outcomes, blacks effectively subsidize the Social Security payments of white folks because they die earlier and work for more years of their life, unable to retire at a reasonable age?

Historically, the media frame about blacks and the economy has been a racialized one. Poor black and brown folks are depicted by the media as the undeserving poor, as lazy, or welfare queens, irresponsible, and possessed of a questionable morality. The black middle class and their accomplishments are denigrated and always under question as they are the product of "affirmative action" and are "unqualified" for the positions which they have earned.

In the Age of Obama, where white racial resentment is naked and driving the Tea Party GOP, I shutter to think that there may be a segment of the public that sees the racial wealth gap as a non-issue, and perhaps even a good thing, as "blacks" and "minorities" shouldn't be doing too well in a time when White America is struggling.

Of course, the Black Conservative banjo players will be brought out to back up this chorus.

In sum, race is the modality in which class is lived in America. More evidence then why a white unemployment rate of 8 percent is a crisis, and an under and unemployment rate for blacks of some 20 or more percent is accepted as "normal." Thus, the job death hemorrhage that has afflicted blacks for several decades is not worthy of mainstream media coverage. It is the norm.

I come full circle in these reflections on wealth and race back to the late (and great) Dr. Manning Marable, a friend and colleague of Professor Michael Dawson. I was lucky to have broken bread with them together years back, just as my journey was first beginning. Trust, they made quite a positive and wonderful impression to say the least.

I know that the puzzle of the black/white wealth gap will not be framed in such a way--where it is accurately portrayed as a continuation of long and deep structural policies and State policy--by a mainstream media that is just learning how to have a reasonable discussion about class.

In terms of narrative quality, one can forgive Captain America: The First Avenger's casual disregard for the character of Bucky and how he just drops out of play halfway through the movie. I can also overlook the uninspiring action scenes that do not really feel like a Captain America film ought to, as normative and imprecise that phrase is, until the motorcycle chase in the last third of the movie.

But when viewed in total, it is hard to overlook how Captain America: The First Avenger lacks any real weight and is missing the intangibles that separate great comic book fare (The Dark Knight; Watchmen; Iron Man; Spiderman 2) from that which is merely run of the mill (The Punisher; Ghost Rider).

To this ghetto nerd comic book fan, Captain America: The First Avenger's deepest problem is how problematic, even by comic book standards, its romanticization of the past and the recycled mythos surrounding "The Greatest Generation" really is.

The movie's story is familiar. Captain America is Steve Rogers, a puny recruit who during World War 2 volunteers to become a super soldier by taking an experimental serum that will give him enhanced strength, endurance, speed, and other amazing abilities. With his childhood sidekick Bucky and the Howling Commandos, Captain America wreaks havoc on a group of high-tech Nazis named HYDRA, and their occult obsessed leader the Red Skull.

Captain America: The First Avenger applies a heavy whitewashing (or is that a "brownwashing?") to World War 2 that is distinguished by a deep commitment and dedication to an insincere multiculturalism and a childish flattening of historical events. More than simple dishonesty, the movie's keen attention to a forced quota of black and brown faces in a Jim Crow era was a distraction that took me out of the frame: rather than watch the film and be caught up in a World War 2 serial adventure, I found myself counting the conspicuous black folks in the foreground and background of almost every scene.

In a Jim Crow military there are black soldiers fully integrated as equals in fictional white Army units without a mention of tension or conflict. There are African Americans as equal partners in the most secret Allied spy programs of World War 2. Black and white folks sit side by side in integrated recruitment centers in New York City. Black and white kids play together in the streets of Brooklyn, a Nathan Glazer ethnic melting pot dream, all the same, united in childhood and rooting for Captain America and the good guys to win The Big One.

An important qualifier: As a viewer who is both a comic book fan and has more than a passing knowledge of the Black Freedom Struggle, I am not expecting, nor would I want, Captain America: The First Avenger to offer a treatise on the Double V campaign for African American freedom and full citizenship at home, and winning with the war against Nazism abroad.

Rather, my hope is for a film that works with these realities in order to enhance storytelling by adding richness and depth to a project--moves that make a movie more entertaining and not less. These are challenges and opportunities to be embraced, not run away from.

Playing script doctor:

1. There could have been a throw away line by Tommy Lee Jones' character that "his unit is the Army we need to beat the Nazis, every man and woman is the best, without exception. This is a war. We have no time for the trivialities of race bigotry in my unit!"

2. Peggy Carter, a female spy for the Brits jokes that she has had many doors shut in her face and thus has learned the value of persistence. Push that element harder by showing some WAVES or WACs in the film who are foregrounded in roles other than those of secretaries, dancing girls, and nurses.

3. When Steve Rogers comes upon the soldiers Gabe Jones (an African American) and Jim Morita (who is an Asian American) in a HYDRA prison, the film could go beyond the cheap joke about the latter being from California. The former could have said he was part of the all African-American Triple Nickels paratroopers, the famed Tuskegee Airmen, or the 761st Black Panthers Tank Battalion; the latter could explicitly state that he is a member of the legendary 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

4. Digging into comic book esoterica, Captain America's iconic shield is made of the rare mineral Vibranium. This sci-fi cousin to "unobtainium" is mined from the African country of Wakanda, a nation that successfully resisted a Nazi invasion in the Captain America comic books. Who is the leader of this small, yet highly advanced country? The one and only Black Panther.

Filmmakers more generally, and white filmmakers in particular, are often caught between a rock and a hard spot on these issues. They are often condemned if people of color are not shown in their films. They are also criticized by conservatives and others if they go "overboard" in such efforts.

My suggestions and appeals are rooted in a desire for sincerity and honesty. One need not make up history to satisfy the political correctness police, to broaden the commercial audience for a film, or to preempt complains that a movie is not "inclusive" enough. Likewise, and although for different reasons, we should be mindful of how the intentional omission of the diversity that is the human experience supports highly problematic conservative racial politics.

For example, the great HBO series "The Pacific" showed the African American marines of Montford Point without much fanfare or heavy handed evangelizing. The brothers were simply "there," albeit in the background, at the battle of Iwo Jima. Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" by comparison--a movie that is quite jingoistic despite its superficial pleadings to the contrary--chose to omit black and brown folks from The Normandy Invasion, lest their presence disrupt the whiteness of memory and the nostalgic lie that is "The Greatest Generation."

The Captain America comic book, in both its Ultimates, and Ed Brubaker run, has been great precisely because of the sophistication with which it approaches the issues of race and gender and how Steve Rogers, a metaphor for a changing America, grapples with a world that is quite different from the one he left behind in the 1940s.

Captain America is a living anachronism. The ways that he reconciles his nostalgic memories with the country's post-imperial present is one of the true joys of the character, and why Captain America has been one of the most compelling reads in recent years.

Captain America: The First Avenger throws that richness into the rubbish pile. By doing so, the movie missed a great opportunity to be a compelling story that solidly leads the audience to the upcoming Avengers film. Moreover, Captain America: The First Avenger insulted the intelligence and maturity of viewers by playing a lazy game with serious history, and hoping that its sleight of hand would go either unnoticed, or its faux history embraced by those either too young (or ignorant) or drunk on colorblind hallucinations of the past to know any better (or perhaps even to care).

Captain America: The First Avenger also commits one final, unforgivable sin. In a movie about a war against tyranny and genocidal evil, even within the rules of comic book fare and their requisite suspension of disbelief, Captain America doesn't even fight real Nazis. The crooked swastika present only for a seconds in the movie. Moreover, while Jewish folk are coded for and signaled to by Captain America: The First Avenger, Steve Roger's "mentor" Dr. Abraham Erskine being the most prominent example, there is no mention of the Holocaust or the death camps.

Politics is popular culture. Popular culture is also one of the ways that history and politics are taught to, reimagined, and understood by a people. Both do serious ideological work.

I am deeply familiar with the standard objection, that fantasy should be just that--"fantasy"--and that "the real world" should be replaced in our popular culture by an America as it "should have been"...and not the America that was and is.

The Captain America character deserves better than such a flat and dishonest depiction of history...even in a comic book universe. The audience deserves better as well.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Sorry, I couldn't resist that old Vaudeville routine. I am going to see Captain America in a few hours and will post a review soon after. Next week, I hope to do a series on the Department of Homeland Security and white terrorism: which will be provocative to say the least as I got both barrels loaded. I really do love white folks. I am their best friend because as Paul Mooney says, "I tell them the truth." Hopefully, my intervention will help the White Soul have a moment of productive, critical self-reflection.

At present, my best friend Black Conservative Garbage Pail Kid Herman Cain is in the midst of self-destructing, despite what some pundits have suggested, with his foolish anti-Muslim bigotry and race baiting--trust, the latter is the script even though Cain's focus is ostensibly on matters of religion.

Herman Cain is a black buffoon. Consequently, he should be treated as such.

To point: the wickedness of Jim Crow stereotyping and race minstrelsy was how it gave life to a lie--we were not incompetent fools, unfit for citizenship, more childlike than adult, and ultimately ill-suited for the American democratic project.

Be it Jumpin Jim Crow, Uncle Tom, or the Black Dandy, one of the recurring themes in the racist imagery deployed against black people was that we were "uppity" and aspired for a higher social standing and responsibility than either earned or deserved. African Americans were natural incompetents when viewed through the White gaze of Jim and Jane Crow America.

That lie is still with us in the 21 century. In the white animosity and resentment faced by Barack Obama, the basic challenges to his legitimacy as President, the assumption by the Tea Party Birther Palin populists has long been that Barack Obama is incompetent and should "know his place."

Ironically, Herman Cain is actually incompetent and not fit to be President of the United States. Could the white supremacist frames of Jim and Jane Crow apply to Herman Cain? Would the visual "work" when applied to him? Would the semiotics of Cain as lawn jockey or a happy servant be a good fit for his personhood and habitus?

I like to play with fire. So let's find out. Consider this our American Pickers meets Photoshop meets Jim Crow meets Herman Cain game.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

As Mr. Burns said to Homer, "dance monkey dance!" It would seem that in the twenty-first century, the college classroom is being reduced to a carnival sideshow self-help session in which instructors are ring leaders.

The great Professor Claire Potter of Tenured Radical fame has moved over to The Chronicle of Higher Education's website. Quite kindly, she also imported her blog roll which includes this humble website. Thus, We Are Respectable Negroes has some new folks who may not have discovered us otherwise.

In welcoming some new readers, many who likely work in higher education, it seemed appropriate to return to my theme of "pedagogical failures." Last Thursday, NPR's Talk of the Nation hosted the esteem Donald Tapscott who discussed his new book Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business And The World, and its thesis that colleges and universities need to retool for the 21st century and change how they engage the 'Net generation.

It is rare that I am moved to even consider calling into a radio program, but on that day I was quite close to pulling over to the side of the road and offering a fusillade or two for the good doctor to consider as rebuttals to his overly generous and rosy depiction of the current crop of college students.

Much of what Tascott offered was nothing new to those who are knowledgeable about the pressures facing colleges and universities in the 21st century. Instructors should place materials online, democratize information for ease of access and use, professors should move from "teacher centered" to a "student centered" classroom, change their teaching styles to suit a limited attention span generation of multitaskers, and that universities had better please the customer by making information "relevant" to students.

Context matters in this discussion. We are in the midst of a broader movement to destroy tenure and to adjunctize the profession, to radically review the role of liberal arts education in light of how it provides a "service" to students entering the labor market, and an overall assault on public education where the good work that is done in the classroom is reduced to a set of deliverables, the value of which can be assessed by bureaucrats and politicians, who then in turn decide who is to be fired and (re)hired. Ultimately, it seems that there is a whole lot being asked of college and university staff without a corresponding increase in compensation or job security.

In sum, after NPR's interview with Don Tapscott I was left with a good many questions, and some initial reactions that would benefit from a good salon. There are a good many educators and others who have thought about theses issues who frequent WARN so your thoughts are invited and welcome.

Let us begin:

1. Is it so problematic that many of the techniques used in the classroom of the 21st century are none to different from those used centuries ago? Is a good lecture, seminar, or discussion not in fact timeless?

2. Are professors employees of students? Should the former be providing some "deliverable" or "service" to the latter? How does this formulation negatively impact the quality of college-level instruction?

3. There is something to be said for the experience of participating in a classroom discussion, attending seminar or lecture, and interacting with one's fellow students. The experience of online learning and downloading materials seems to be missing out on the intangibles which separate a positive and deep learning experience from a superficial one. In the 21st century is college simply to be a way of delivering facts? Consequently, it is out-priced in an era of relatively "free" information online?

4. As mentioned in the NPR interview, is Phoenix University really a model of learning that we should be striving for across the board?

6. Second point: how can Tapscott suggest that Millenials are doing well as measured by grades, when there has been a notorious amount of grade inflation in recent years, so severe that an "A" is now expected--even for the most mediocre of work?

7. I am no Luddite. I almost exclusively use a seminar approach in my teaching. As a function of that policy, I do not play Powerpoint karaoke, nor do I provide reading summaries, handouts, or offer copies of my notes to students. I also do not allow the use of laptops in my classes (this policy has greatly improved the quality of conversation; it has also weeded out weaker students who would rather be doing something else than giving the class their full focus). Am I so wrong? Are my students "missing out" on something?

8. I>clickers that reduce classes to a game show. Tweeting questions to professors instead of raising one's hand and asking them. Social networking in the classroom. In total: What are we teaching students by facilitating a culture where basic interpersonal skills are neglected, and their semi-anonymous narcissistic predilections coddled?

9. Tapscott praises the wondrous abilities of multitasking snowflakes who get good grades, can do three things at once, and (to my eyes and as mentioned in the NPR segment) are proud of never reading a book. Help me out, I thought the research suggested that multitasking is in fact changing brain structure...but in problematic ways? And that multitaskers perform poorly on said tasks all things being equal?

10. Back to technology. I have seen some great podcasts online of master lecturers from places such as Yale (cheers to my hometown), Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. But, what of the move to make all lectures available to any who would want to watch them? Is this in conflict with personal and academic freedom? Does the move to put classes and lectures online create the dangerous illusion that consumption by proxy is a fair substitute for having one's butt in the seat of a lecture hall?

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Excoriation! God demands blood! She is a witch! Where is her familiar! I saw her communing with Satan by the old Elm tree! The pig killed my wife! I saw Jim rise from the dead and walk the streets after his burial, he is possessed by an evil spirit!

The crowds that gathered outside of the Casey Anthony trial and heckled upon her subsequent release were the stuff of the Middle Ages (or alternatively the descendants of a lynch mob in either the old West or Jim Crow South). They did not have pitchforks and nooses. So perhaps that is a whee bit of progress as Casey Anthony was not torn limb from limb by those seeking "justice."

Frankly, the reflexive spectacle of a mania fueled moral panic in which white girls and women are forever under threat by evil moms and other villains is really nothing new or special. And moreover, the media coverage--where a desperate press is running on fumes and has resorted to talking about eerie coincidences which portend the rage of the Gods and prove that vengeance will be done--would be laughable if it were not so pathetic.

From the witch hysteria that swept Salem, Massachusetts and Europe in which many thousands of "unconventional" women (and others) were killed as a way of cementing social cohesion, stealing land and property, or as acts that granted social standing to accusers, to the media circus of the 21st century, it would seem that our little monkey brains have not changed all too much over the centuries. Group think still holds purchase.

[A question: Is the allure of old habits an adaptive response for surviving in a world where big frightening monsters could gobble up our primate ancestors on the plains of the Serengeti?]

As we watch the crying, hysterical mouth-breathers who have been suckered into the Casey Anthony spectacle and are now forced to find another drug, such echoes of the past sound none too unfamiliar in the present, do they not?

Medieval Court Cases: Animals on Trial?

One of the most bizarre human-animal trends of all recorded history took place in Europe during the Middle Ages. This was the formal prosecution of animals accused of committing crimes against people. Animals charged with such crimes (usually murder) were brought to court, appointed a lawyer, and tried, just as a person would be. Records show that hundreds of animals were found guilty and then executed by hanging.

In the 1994 article “The Law Is an Ass: Reading E. P. Evans’ The Medieval Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals” (Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies, published by the organization Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Piers Beirne described the practice in detail.

The article reviewed books on the subject by several authors, focusing on one written by E. P. Evans in 1906. Evans described 191 animal trials, mostly from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Most of the trials took place in France, Italy, and Germany. There are also a few historical records of trials in other European countries and in the United States, Canada, and Brazil. Animals were tried for a variety of offenses besides murder, mostly fraud and theft. Records show that many were tortured for confessions (just as humans were) prior to the trial. It is not clear how animal confessions were interpreted, considering that animals cannot speak human languages.

Criminal proceedings against animals were handled with the utmost seriousness by medieval legal authorities. Animals that harmed humans were considered servants of the devil because they had violated God’s directive in the Bible that humans should have dominion over animals. A particular Bible verse, Exodus 21:28, was often cited as the grounds for executing an animal convicted of murder: “If an ox gore a man or a woman that they die, then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten.” The penalties for offenses less serious than murder matched those given to humans for the same types of crimes.

Evans listed a variety of domestic and wild animals, as well as rodents, sea creatures, birds, and insects, that were tried at various times by government or church courts. Those that could not be physically brought to court were tried in absentia. In general, only the larger domestic animals, such as pigs, bulls, cows, horses, sheep, and dogs, actually appeared in court and were subjected to punishments. A few animals were found innocent or granted pardons or reprieves by authorities. Many wild animals found guilty by church courts were excommunicated (exiled from the church).

The vast majority of criminal defendants were pigs, probably because farmers allowed them to roam free much of the time. In 1386 a pig accused of murdering an infant was tried and convicted by a court in Falaise, France. The pig was hanged at the gallows by the village hangman. Her six piglets were charged with being accessories to the crime but were acquitted “on account of their youth and their mother’s bad example.”

A lawyer could establish his reputation by performing well in animal trials. In France in the early 1500s, a lawyer named Bartholomé Chassenée was appointed to represent some rats that had eaten and destroyed some barley (a felony). Chassenée used a series of clever legal maneuvers to delay the trial as long as possible. At one point he convinced the judge that it was too dangerous for his clients to come to court on the appointed day because of the many cats in the neighborhood. Chassenée became famous throughout France for his excellent legal skills.

It is not clear why medieval courts went to the trouble to formally try animals before executing them. Some historians believe that these trials were intended to be warnings to animals and people about the consequences of their actions. Others believe the trials represented a philosophical desire to exert some human control over nature.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

As a ghetto nerd, I love some good science fiction. As a ghetto nerd military history buff grognard I am a sucker for a good counter-factual or "what if?" scenario. Much of the latter is pure pablum--although I have to admit that I have a soft-spot for Harry Turtledove's epic Civil War/World War 1/World War 2
alternate universe series. Nevertheless, various examples of the sci-fi "what if?" genre often hit a a sweet spot when one is looking for some late night at the bar drinking some Stella reading.

I recently stumbled upon the book Weapons of Choice which takes 21st century military technology, adds some The Final Countdown elements, and puts the U.S. Navy of the year 2021 in the middle of the Battle of Midway (I won't give away any more details). Weapons of Choice is also great fun because the author doesn't shy away from exploring how the social norms of the 21st century, especially those surrounding race and gender, would befuddle many Jim Crow era white Americans.

Weapons of Choice features a great moment where one of the white bigots in the World War 2 era U.S. Navy is shocked by the people of color he encounters and how they have mastered the stuff of Amazing Stories and Flash Gordon. In an inferiority laced moment of frustration said character utters a priceless phrase, "space coons," to describe these near-alien Americans from the future.

As a ghetto nerd, and connoisseur of racial slurs, "space coons" leaped off of the page and instantly into my mental Rolodex. Space coons also triggered a series of connected thoughts on the whiteness of science fiction.

Historically, classic sci-fi was embraced as a site of imagination that freed readers and authors to envision a world that was radically humanistic and progressive. While wonderfully imaginative and inclusive (in their best instances), in its worst iterations the genre was quite literally a "white" space where robots and aliens stood in for people of color and the Other.

In classic science fiction the protagonist was often a white man encountering an untamed world that represented the various colonial and imperial projects of the West. Alternatively, he was a time traveler who arrived in a world where a peaceful White civilization was under siege and its members were quite literally consumed by savages coded as non-white. At its heart, so much of golden age science fiction was satisfying to the the White gaze precisely because black and brown folks were not present. The race problem was solved, and thus a Utopia created, by removing what was understood to be the root of the trouble.

For example, Isiah Lavender makes a great point in his book Race in American Science Fiction where he smartly suggests that Barack Obama is quintessentially the stuff of science fiction because for most of this country's history the bounded nature of racialized citizenship deemed an African American President an impossibility.

When considered from this critical framework (with policy preferences and partisanship placed aside) President Obama is a figure of The Fantastic.

Some have been suggested that President Obama is a bound man because of his role as a racial triangulator. Echoing Isiah, I would double down and add some additional nuance to his sharp observation: the figure of President Obama was/is the stuff of fantasy and wish fulfillment. He should not exist. Yet, he does.

As a fantastical figure his very personhood frightens so many because given the weight of history a black man could not (and should not) be President of the United States. As a figure that is the stuff of speculative fiction and sci-fi (or perhaps more rightly Afrofuturism and Black Science Fiction), Obama is also a vessel for the hopes and dreams of many Americans. Thus, the tears when he was elected...and an impossible standard which he cannot hope to reach as the first black President of The United States of America.

Thus, my suggestion that President Obama is a space coon. He isn't alone. For any negro or negress who turns up where you least expect them and in defiance of Whiteness and the White Imagination is one too.

That isn't a bad thing per se. His status as a space coon goes a long way towards explaining the virulent and hateful antipathy faced by President Obama from embittered Right-wing, White racial reactionary populists. President Obama's identity as a space coon also explains the frustration felt by many who seek a savior amd hero in the form of a black man who happens to be President. In total, confronting the unbelievable and heretofore unimaginable can generate no small amount of either cognitive upset and/or wild eyed dreaming.

Ultimately, space coons are people too. They both inspire and amaze. And they cannot help but to disappoint.

I wonder what Robert's Rules of Order would say about the following: Mitch McConnell, Republican Senate Minority Leader has proposed a solution wherein Congress surrenders its own responsibility for the debt ceiling to the President, he in turn raises the limit in face of the threat of an improbable super-majority vote to stop said legislation from being enacted, while the Republicans get to save face by issuing faux protest votes and resolutions in the face of legislation their own Senate Minority Leader proposed.

Color me confused and befuddled.

As David Brooks suggested in the NY Times, the contemporary Republican Party is a cult where crazed devotion to the most radical Conservative ideology has overruled all common sense and normal political behavior.

President Obama, a chronic compromiser, has rewarded this behavior at every turn through an almost slavish belief that the Republican Party--a group who have publicly announced that a Pyrrhic victory in 2012 in which the American economy is destroyed if need be--are working in good faith towards the common good.

Once more to a reminder of how a healthy democracy is dependent upon responsible political parties.

1. Political parties are to be responsible to the public because they are held accountable at the polls.2. Political parties are to be responsible in government as they are working for the collective interest with an understanding that consensus and compromise are the foundations of good government.3. Political parties are to be responsible as organizations where they act as gate keepers who put forth candidates for office who while appealing to their respective base, are also centrist enough to maintain a tradition of consensus in appealing to the healthy middle of American public opinion.

For a variety of reasons (the changing nature of mass media; the rise of opinion journalism and 24 hour cable news; a failed educational system; the transformation of the Citizen into the Consumer in an era where the State is expected to fail in its responsibilities; and an inability to confront the decline of American Empire in the new Gilded Age) the last few decades have witnessed a crumbling in the collective understanding of what good government and responsible political parties entail.

The antics of the Tea Party GOP in the Age of Obama have only accelerated this process.

Despite its troubles and a long arch where full democracy remains a work in progress, there was something to those heady, stuck on a broken repeat button talking point claims of American Exceptionalism by the Right--the country's political institutions were taken as models of healthy democracy and good governance throughout the world. With the politically skulduggerous, and twisted approach to finding a "win only for us" solution on the debt ceiling, Mitch McConnel and the Tea Party GOP has thrown that well-earned brand name into a fetid latrine.

In sum, the McConnell plan for solving the debt ceiling crisis is one better suited for a banana republic than for the world's "greatest democracy". Ultimately, McConnel's approach lacks transparency, avoids responsibility, abdicates legislative authority, and betrays Congressional power. Perhaps, and most importantly, it expands the power of the Executive branch in ways that border on the unconstitutional.

Consider the following for a moment. During the last part of the 20th century we have witnessed the rise of what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. presciently described as "The Imperial Presidency." Domestically, we have seen a surrender of responsibility by Congress as a short-term solution to the debt crisis. In keeping with the law of unintended (or are they in fact planned?) consequences, McConnel's plan is one more nail in the coffin of balanced government and restraint on the "unitary executive."

There is a soundtrack playing in the background as President Obama mulls the Tea Party GOP's offer of a parlay in the debt crisis. He is the victim in a horror movie going into the dark room or opening the closet door all the while the audience is yelling at him to run away. He is the trusting soul walking into a clear trap, willing to sign a Faustian bargain that gives his enemies even more ammunition with which to shoot him.

As President Obama mulls over if he should take the poison pill from the barb laced glove of Mitch McConnell, it will ultimately be the American working, middle classes, and poor who lose in this game of political chicken.

This is how democracy ends with a death of 1,000 cuts...and perhaps not with thunderous applause as the rich, the corporateocracy, and their gaggle win out either way. Mitch McConnell's debt ceiling gambit is sadly one more brick in that long trotted road.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

See what you all made me do, with all of you egging me on about the history of white women (and men) claiming that black mengiant negroes black rapists highwaymen killed their kids (or wives and husbands)?

Why do you have to let the facts, history, and weight of social and political context get in the way of a good moral panic about white children living in immediate peril? Unsafe even in their own homes? Always at risk, and for a panoply of reasons?

You folks can be so callous and cruel with all of your race obsessions.

Emerge Magazine's cover story on Clarence Thomas that depicted him as a lawn jockey is to this day the go to, classic, "boot on throat" attack against Black Conservatives. For my dollar, Lee Daniels' essay "The American Way" is a close second in Emerge Magazine's portfolio.

White women are a protected class in this country. White children even more so. Black folks the most vulnerable. Daniels captures this dynamic perfectly in the following essay from 1995.

****The American Way

The crime, as the tearful, young mother reported it, was demonic–a carjacking in which two infants had been swept up by a thief as he roared off with the car. The mother’s pleas for her sons’ safe return, made to a national media who had gathered in the small cityof Union, South Carolina, to report the story’s denouement in all its pathos, were wrenching.

Much of the nation was transfixed by the pictures of the angelic infants and by Susan Smith’s mask of grieving motherhood.

Looming as a backdrop to these images of innocence was Smith’s description of the demon figure: The brother in the skullcap. The Black Bogeyman.

But the nation soon discovered there was no Black devil. Smith, the young, White mother of the tear-streaked face, possessed by demons of her own, later confessed to authorities that she strapped her sons into her car and plunged them to their deaths in a nearby lake.

But until the moment when the local police officials bluffed a confession out of her, there was that image, loose again on the surface of the national consciousness-the image out of the warped mind of the ante-bellum South, out of Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, The Clansman, and D.W Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation.

There was that image again–the one that had proved so valuable to three generations of White Southern politicians during the era of Grand Apartheid, and to George Bush, the Republican Party’s 1988 standard-bearer, who restored it to a position of “respectability” in the White-centrist discourse on race relations.

There was that image again–the one that a White Boston businessman named Charles Stuart had used in 1989 to try to hide the fact that he had murdered his pregnant wife for her life insurance. Stuart’s story that a Black man killed his wife and also shot him ignited a police state of siege for African-American men in Boston for nearly three weeks. A Black man with a criminal record was eventually arrested and charged with the crime. Not until Stuart killed himself in January 1990 as his ruse unraveled, was that man–and Boston’s Black community–cleared of the crime.

In a bizarre twist, Jesse Anderson, the man killed with Jeffrey Dahmer in Wisconsin prison by a Black inmate, was serving time for the 1992 killing of his wife. He had falsely claimed that two Black men had stabbed and bludgeoned his wife to death.

Susan Smith knew the powerful grip the image of the dangerous Black man has on White Americans’ psyche.

And who can doubt it? In her descent into pathological desperation, that knowledge became for her, as it had for Charles Stuart, the crucial element in calculating that she could commit the gruesome crime and get away with it. The police of Union, South Carolina, to their credit, behaved differently than those of Boston.

They weren’t as gullible, or as willing to trample the rights of Black people based upon the mere word of a White person.

But is there anyone who believes that the story of Susan Smith will be the end of the racist scapegoating of African-Americans, a compulsion that once again suffuses American society?...

Friday, July 8, 2011

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. The age old con game of distracting moral panics continues with the Casey Anthony case.

The economy is dead in the water, President Barack Obama is revealing himself to be a consummate corporatist triangulator who is playing the Tea Party GOP's game of suicide with the debt limit, repressive governments continue their violence against the people's movements in the Arab world, and one more gem--manned space travel-- in what was the golden crown of U.S. Empire and global dominance has been thrown into the dust pile of history.

The latter is heavy with symbolic weight in the Age of the Great Recession: the many thousands of people who directly and indirectly depended on NASA's space shuttle program for their livelihoods will now be either in the breadline, fighting for a limited number of berths in the private sector, or most frighteningly, seeking minimum wage McJobs.

These truly important matters of national concern and well-being are sideshows and inconvenient facts to the media's obsessive coverage of the Casey Anthony case. Perhaps Stalin was correct when he said that, "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic?" The obvious sadness at a life lost too young is a given, but the Casey Anthony trial is one more example of how race, crime, the value of human life, and justice problematically intersect in American life.

My point is ultimately a simple one. Whiteness wants justice when it is convenient. Whiteness does not want justice in all things. Nor does Whiteness want justice consistently. Thus, the howls, shocks, and surprise of "mainstream America" when to their eyes a miscarriage of justice occurs and one of their own is a victim. Justice should be sought in all things, and consistently for all people.

The media circus around the Casey Anthony case, and the curious, but not at all surprising silence when the legal system fails its other citizens, once more proves the myopia of Whiteness--and again how treason to Whiteness is loyalty to humanity...and justice for Caylee Anthony.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Oh the good old days when a man could smoke a cigarette on television.

In the interest of balance, I have decided to occasionally highlight Conservatives that I find tolerable...and perhaps even like, if not respect. Although he was wrong on Civil Rights, I still hold William F. Buckley's intellect in high regard.

A healthy American democracy is prefaced on responsible political parties and a responsible electorate that works in the interest of the Common Good. In the Age of Obama and the Great Recession, the Republican Party with its cultish followers have abdicated their seats at the table of good sense in order to play a game of ill informed political brinkmanship with the U.S. economy as the ultimate victim. It would seem that once more the Federalists were correct in their worries about the rabble and the dangers of vested interests in the form of a political party that has lowered itself to the level of a brutish faction.

I wonder if the Constitutional fetishists on the Right appreciate that irony?

As seen here, Ali, one of my heroes, is not a perfect man. Nor, is he always as coherent and integrated in his thinking as memory and its worshipful lens would have us believe. Likewise, Huey Newton, he whose picture adorns many a young black nationalist in training's college dorm wall, is also freed from the lens of nostalgia. Both are sincere and imperfect. Neither is as articulate as we dreamed them to be decades later. Huey P. Newton and Muhammad Ali remain high in my estimation precisely because of those traits. Once more, I like my heroes down to Earth...not so high on a pedestal that I cannot reach them.

The American people do not need great men or great women to get us out of this mess. We just need reasonable folks who are not willing to burn a village in order to "liberate it" in the interest of advancing their political ideology.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

After reading The Christian Science Monitor's essay "Why Herman Cain Could be the GOP's Perfect Obama Rival," I am in violation of one of my own pedagogical rules as something about Professor Charlton McIlwain's analysis has rubbed me the wrong way--and well, for lack of a better phrase, it feels personal.

I often tell my students that the "I" in our discussions of politics is a beginning and not an end for analysis. Normative priors are important to the degree to which they are transparent and acknowledged. Feelings matter, emotions matter, but they must not cloud reasoned analysis. Especially in discussions of race and identity politics--where the personal can be quite political--this is not always easy.

McIlwain's analysis of Herman Cain's branding in his campaign ads is spot on. And while the focus on the strategies used by Cain to distinguish and market himself as a black conservative to white conservative audiences may be correct, the conclusion (that those strategies will translate into electoral success) is a shaky one at best. By comic book analogy, if President Obama is Superman, Herman Cain is his bizzarro universe flying backwards doppelganger. Ultimately, the latter has not a snowball's chance in hell of winning the Republican nomination in 2012.

Nevertheless, there is a sharp moment in "Why Herman Cain Could be the GOP's Perfect Obama Rival" that gave me pause. Consider the following passage:

But Cain counters the black liberal stigma in one fell swoop. He stamped “conservative” across his political ads, making the label his badge of honor. You see, in today’s racial parlance, conservative is not only antithetical to being liberal; it is antithetical to being black, which is what you must be if you’re a black man looking for Republican votes.

Cain further showcases his conservative persona. In one such ad he recalls one of his greatest life lessons. “My daddy always said, ’dem that’s comin’, get on the wagon, dems that ain't, get out the way.” Cain’s quaint recollection taps into conservative nostalgia. They remind viewers that the good ‘ol days were not only simpler. They were days when folks like Cain’s daddy still spoke the broken English of their slave forebears, and tended the mules pulling those wagons.

Label me a pedant, but as a point of historical clarification, those times were never simple.

McIlwain offers a half-digested thought where follow through is oh so critical. Most important, a failure to bring the argument full circle and to close its loop leads to an avoidance of some hard questions such as the following:

1. Why do Conservatives find said images comforting? Why the stereotypical image of worn over, former slaves, who are simple folksy types ready to receive the benevolence of the White Man's Burden, and not of a free people with agency who fought every step of the way to liberate themselves in the face of horrific and oppressive white supremacy?

2. What precisely about the idea of black folks a few years removed from slavery and perpetual status as human property resonates with the White Conservative Soul?

3. Is this a Gone with the Wind moment, where some silly, empty nostalgia of happy darkies on the old plantation still looms large over the American psyche? What types of political work does that do for Herman Cain, for the Tea Party GOP, for Conservatives?

4.Why do folks like Herman Cain (i.e. his obsession with "being off the plantation" or a "runaway slave") and others feel so free to abuse the history of black Americans and the hellish reality that was chattel slavery? No other group, with perhaps the exception of Native Americans, has their history so easily played with, where there are few, if any, consequences for such gross misrepresentations of fact?

There is angst afoot here. In sum, "Why Herman Cain Could be the GOP's Perfect Obama Rival," feels like a racial microaggression, where it is not the intent, or even the soundness of The Christian Science Monitor's claims, but the context and implication of said work that signals an uncomfortable and unpleasant truth.

It was fun, and fingers crossed, there is more to come. I was a radio host for many years, and as I do more interviews I am reminded of how I miss the format. Perhaps Crom will smile down on me and an opportunity will make itself available in the near future? We shall see...

Monday, July 4, 2011

Academics are often too nice. I am not: the Tea Party Koch brothers funded movement is sinister. They are the Know Nothings of the 21st century and should be swept into the dustbin of history with great haste.

Professor Michael Dyson brings some sonnage to George Will on This Week and the onanistic originalism of the Constitutional fetishists. Brother Dyson is sometimes a mile wide and an inch deep in his analysis. But he is never boring or lacking in lyrical dexterity, flow, and more than a few quotables--fitting given that dude is "the hip hop professor" after all.

Harvard's Jill Lepore is also great. She has had her foot ten inches up the Tea Party brigands behinds from jump street. Dr. Lepore's C-SPAN interview from a few months back is also quite good, as is her book on the tea baggers and their misunderstandings of American history and the political tradition of which they are part (but not heir, please make note of the distinction, as it is quite important).

The Constitution is a practical document, authored by imperfect people, and has always been a work in progress, whose fully democratic possibilities still await us. The Framers thought the American people to be forward looking and not moribund by a narrow devotion to the past. The Constitutional fetishists on the Right oftentimes, and in particular as of late, have forgotten that fact.

This can be forgiven: the impossible made real with the election of Barack Obama, the first black President of the United States, can tend to do that to those who are drunk on the white racial frame and possessed of a sick White Conservative Soul.

On July 4, 2011 let's embrace a new maturity. America is at the apotheosis of her Empire. It is now time to grow up and see her founding document as something real and practical. The Constitution is not divine. Moreover, the answers to our collective problems do exist and will be found...but not if the American people embrace a wax museum come to life version of their collective history (and possible futures).

Sunday, July 3, 2011

I hope you are all enjoying your 4th of July weekend gluttony, cheap beer drinking, failed efforts at rutting, obligatory fireworks and patriotic proclamations. Independence Day is like all national holidays--a day to reinscribe sacred mythologies. One such mythology is that of Crispus Attucks, the first person to be killed by the British in what would become The War for American Independence.

Crispus Attucks is a great character in our national play. For Conservatives, low information real American types, the average lay person, Right-wing bloviators, and Constitutional fetishists, Attucks is proof positive that the country, and the framers, were not racist, and slavery a mere inconvenience in America's "exceptional" narrative. It would seem that in total, simple minds like simple stories.

For black Americans and their allies, Crispus Attucks is a martyr who can be channeled to demonstrate the quintessentially American nature of the black experience. Because whiteness remains interchangeable with "American," Attucks is a great counterweight. If the first American killed in the war to end British "tyranny" was black, what does that say about a narrative in which blacks folks are/were imagined as perpetual outsiders?

Moreover, what of inconvenient facts? For example, more blacks fought for the British than the Continentals. With the former promising manumission, and the later hypocrites on their failure to reconcile their own high minded virtues of liberty and democracy with the perpetual bondage of many thousands, the choice seemed a logical one. And lest there be any confusion, African American Loyalists and Continentals were both engaged in a grand freedom struggle for their people.

One of my favorite little known African American heroes who happened to fight for the British is the legendary Colonel Tye. A former slave, he put the fear of God in white Continentals throughout New Jersey and New York. Sadly, Colonel Tye will never get his own movie because Americans across the color line prefer their stories of black liberty and freedom to be portrayed in simplistic terms.

This Brother was no joke. Read on:

****

Colonel Tye, the most feared and respected guerrilla commander of the Revolution, was one of the many enslaved Africans who escaped and fought for the British.

Known in his youth as Titus, he was one of four young men owned by John Corlies of Shrewsbury, in the eastern part of Monmouth County, New Jersey. Shrewsbury Quakers, under increasing pressure from their Philadelphia-influenced counterparts to the west, finally began to end slavery among themselves in the 1760s. Corlies did not follow the local practice of educating his slaves or of freeing them on their 21st birthdays, and by 1775, he was one of the few remaining Quaker slaveholders in Monmouth County.

In November 1775, the day after Dunmore's Proclamation was issued, 22-year old Titus fled from his cruel, quick-tempered master, joining the flood of Monmouth County blacks who sought refuge with the British as soldiers, sailors and workers. Titus changed his name, gaining notoriety three years later as Captain Tye, the pride of Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment.

While not formally commissioning black officers, the British army often bestowed titles out of respect, and Tye quickly earned their respect. In his first known military incursion, the June, 1778 Battle of Monmouth (in which not a single black from the county fought for the patriots), Tye captured a captain in the Monmouth militia.

In July, 1779, Tye's band launched a raid on Shrewsbury, and carried away clothing, furniture, horses, cattle, and two of the town's inhabitants. With his "motley crew" of blacks and white refugees known as "cow-boys," Tye continued to attack and plunder patriot homes, using his knowledge of Monmouth County's swamps, rivers and inlets to strike suddenly and disappear quickly. These raids, often aimed at former masters and their friends, were a combination of banditry, reprisal, and commission; Tye and his men were well-paid by the British, sometimes earning five gold guineas.

During the harsh winter of 1779, Tye was among an elite group of twenty-four black Loyalists, known as the Black Brigade, who joined with the Queen's Rangers, a British guerrilla unit, to protect New York City and to conduct raids for food and fuel.

By 1780, Colonel Tye had become an important military force. Within one week in June, he led three actions in Monmouth County. On June 9, Tye and his men murdered Joseph Murray, hated by the Loyalists for his summary execution of captured Tories under a local vigilante law. On June 12, while the British attacked Washington's dwindling troops, Tye and his band launched a daring attack on the home of Barnes Smock, capturing the militia leader and twelve of his men, destroying their cannon, depriving Washington of needed reinforcements, and striking fear into the hearts of local patriots.

In response, Governor Livingston, who had tried two years before to abolish slavery in New Jersey, invoked martial law -- a measure which proved totally ineffective -- even as large numbers of blacks, heartened by news of Tye's feats, fled to British-held New York.

In a series of raids throughout the summer, Tye continued to debilitate and demoralize the patriot forces. In a single day, he and his band captured eight militiamen (including the second in command), plundered their homes, and took them to imprisonment in New York, virtually undetected and without suffering a single casualty.

In September, 1780 Tye led a surprise attack on the home of Captain Josiah Huddy, whom Loyalists had tried to capture for years. Amazingly, Huddy and his friend Lucretia Emmons managed to hold off their attackers for two hours, until the Loyalists flushed them out by setting the house afire. During the battle, Tye was shot in the wrist, and days later, what was thought to be minor wound turned fatal when lockjaw set in.

After Tye's death, Colonel Stephen Blucke of the Black Pioneers replaced him as leader of the raiders, continuing their attacks well after the British defeat at Yorktown. Tye's reputation lived on, among his comrades as well as the Patriots, who argued that the war would have been won much sooner had Tye been enlisted on their side.

The real money shot in Cain's channeling of Birtherism is how he is the human chaff and cover for the worst of the GOP's race baiting. In the Age of Obama, he is the black front man for Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy where the latter's famous admission still rings true in the stale "Kenyan" and "show us the birth certificate" verbal Right wing ejaculations that:

''You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

''And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'''

The relevant portion of the interview follows. I do wonder what was edited out, and if the reporter tried to save some of what remains of Herman Cain's dignity.

****

Ballad of the Long Shot

Before you announced your campaign, you said that the liberal establishment is scared that “a real black man might run against Barack Obama.” Are you suggesting Obama isn’t really black?

A real black man is not timid about making the right decisions, that’s what I meant. Look, I’m not getting into this whole thing about President Obama. It is documented that his mother was white and his father was from Africa. If he wants to call himself black, fine. If he wants to call himself African-American, fine. I’m not going down this color road.

But you’re saying he’s not really a black man.

Not in terms of a strong black man that I’m identifying with. I identify with a strong black man like Martin Luther King Jr., or my dad, Luther Cain Jr., who didn’t have a lot of formal education, but he had a Ph.D. in common sense.

It has been said that the Tea Party has embraced you partly to provide cover for some racism in its ranks — like, How could racists support a black guy?

There’s no validity to that whatsoever. People who are still making those accusations have no other way to intimidate the growing force of the Tea Party citizens’ movement.

At Tea Party rallies, you see signs referring to Obama as Kenyan. Are those racist?

Not if you’re from Kenya. But he was born here.

I don’t think calling him a Kenyan is racist. Secondly, I think those kinds of signs have stopped because the leaders of the Tea Party movement have instructed their folks that we don’t need to do that kind of stuff.

Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I am a political essayist, cultural critic, educator, and host of the podcast known as "The Chauncey DeVega Show".

I have been a guest on the BBC, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

My writing has been featured by Salon, Alternet, The New York Daily News, and the Daily Kos.

My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, as well as online magazines and publications such as The Atlantic, Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Judge me by my enemies. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.